My Images

First, I'd like you to know this is a work in progress. Expect changes and updates. Please come back to watch this gallery evolve.

The images in this gallery are all downsized images with sufficient resolution for reasonable online viewing. My prints are made from high resolution images.

Photographic prints are often offered in standard print sizes. This is largely an artifact of film sizes and the assumption that all images will be used full-frame.

I have chosen to deviate from the standards. My image proportions are based on composition. This means my finished images are all custom sizes. Image and finished size options for each piece are listed in the shopping cart. Sizes are listed as image Width x Height, finished Width x Height. Canvases appear with only one size, as all canvases listed are offered unframed.

The choices of prepared images in my gallery are limited to what I consider best or those preparations for which I get the most requests. If you would like an alternate treatment of an image, please feel free to request it.

Ideally, all buyers would have the opportunity to pick up their pieces in person and I'd have the pleasure of making their acquaintance. I know that won't be possible in all cases. Shipping finished pieces is a risky business. To minize the risk, I will only ship framed pieces with plexiglass. Further, I won't assume a standard shipping method. I'm willing to explore alternate means to get my finished product to my buyer safely intact. For that reason, I ask that all purchases that require shipping be made by selecting the "email" or "offline" options on the cart. No charge will be made until we have had a chance to discuss the options.

Every photographer fits in a spectrum that ranges from an obsession with image capture and realistic presentation to the photographer that finds their highest calling in transforming captured images. I think I have multiple personalities in this spectrum. Each of them is assigned an album in my gallery. Each takes a certain mindset, so I tend to enter periods of only working on abstracts in my lab or immersing myself in the field to gather images that I want to present photorealistically. In the end, regardless of phase, I will work in my lab. My tools are digital. When the output is abstract most of my time is spent in the lab.

My Approach

You may have noticed that the proliferation of digital cameras brought a tsunami of images and information. Type of camera, exposure details, time, location... you can know it all. A while back I caught myself reading the EXIF and IPTC data before spending time viewing a photographer's image. I felt caught up in a litany of reciting and reading data. The data were stepping out in front of the artist's work!

The experience altered me. It shocked me into an examination of my own work that put me on my journey of discovering redemptive beauty in imperfection. Now I find value in images that fail numerical muster. Now I screen each image for some essential element that can be the seed of something entirely new. I have begun to work more as a sculptor than photographer.

My abstract series is a direct result of this journey. Here, my role as photographer is to deliver a lump of clay. The hard work is manipulation and sculpting.

This is not to say that I deprecate the role of photographer as artist. In fact, I have a great respect and admiration for the craft, discipline and art in photography, that process before the darkroom (digital or chemical.) My nature series is my effort to share my personal experience of the beauty I enter when I venture into deserts, forests, mountains -- places where the effects of human construction and human activity are minimal. Those experiences foster a primal connection. Factoring out human influence in this way gives context for understanding the human element.

My monochrome series explores my visual experience mapped onto a world where only shades of one color are allowed. A kind of straight jacket that when I stoped fighting it, brought new perspective. It revealed aspects of the image I never saw before.

Now we get to the crux of my understanding of photography. Despite our best efforts to make photography a precise science, it has remained a tool of abstraction. No doubt technology will address this with improvements. I embrace that change. Today, the limitations of photography necessarily alter some important truths. Three dimensions are collapsed into two. It is the essential job of a lens to distort light so that it creates an image on a flat surface. That process is much more arbitrary than we would like to believe. No two lenses will create identical two dimensional maps of the three dimensional reality they are presented. Colors are approximations, distorted by lens, film or image sensors and finally the print process. No photographic process captures the full color gamut of the real world. Information is lost. Substitutions are made. All light whether transmitted or reflected is transformed into reflected light in a print. The dynamic range of light is compressed into the luminance of reflected light off of a print. What if the light source is a 60 watt bulb? How would that compare to full sunlight? This is just an incomplete analysis to illustrate the fiction we must work with in order to tell our photographic story.

That needn't be bad news. Just as a successful novel casts light on truth through fiction, a good photograph must point to the reality it set out to create through the only language available to it -- alteration. That is a terrific challenge!

If you accept my premise that photography is, even in its most honest attempt at realism, an extreme act of alteration then you may find the steps I take to further abstract images a much smaller leap. Maybe you won't find it odd when I say the images I've worked hardest to alter reach a closer orbit around truth than my images that appear photorealistic.